A reviewer of Debra Dickerson's second book, a reflection on race in America at the turn of the century, dismisses it with prejudice, undeservedly I suspect. Dickerson, as longtime readers may recall, is an African-American journalist and Harvard Law School graduate who wrote a memoir that turned heads. She was on my blogroll until her blogs went on hiatus during a difficult pregnancy. Though she is more conservative than I am, I usually find her thoughts intelligent and insightful. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (pictured left) a history professor, analyzed Color Blind: A manifesto against the stifling politics of racial identity, for the Washington Post.
In her new book, journalist Debra Dickerson offers the welcome declaration that "blackness is collapsing under the weight of its contradictions, just as overt racism did." By way of illustration, she cites "black camps," where "affluent black parents pay to have their children spend time in the 'hood' " to get in touch with their blackness and be exposed to "African American vernacular and cultural references" they might have lost out on in their pursuit of such "generic" interests as classical music. This line of argument is not entirely new. Shelby Steele and others have argued that adherence to a black identity is, in part, a response of an uneasy black middle class to its own remarkable success in the post-civil rights era. Dickerson's take on the subject, although offering some food for thought, ends up collapsing under the weight of a few contradictions of its own.
Hold it right there. I've been following the exploration of the idea of imposed identity in another book, Richard Power's National Book Critics Circle Award best novel nominee, The Time of Our Singing. The novel chronicles the lives of an interracial couple wed in 1939 and their three children. The parents decide to rear their children "outside of race." But from the neighborhood playground on, race, other people's interpretation of it, shapes the lives of all three young Stroms. It seems to me that we can exhort and hope all we want to, but the imposition of blackness, brownness, yellowness or redness is not something an individual controls. For the foreseeable future, white America will continue to define people of color as 'other.'
The reviewer continues.
A particular notion of black identity — one that associates blackness with failure and inadequacy — originated in white racism but has found a new lease on life in the ministrations of black politicians. Dickerson thinks most black leaders, unwilling to accept the reality of the civil rights movement's revolutionary accomplishments, are wedded to hopelessly outdated platforms. These leaders continue to see white oppression as the primary obstacle to the well-being of blacks and thus aim their complaints at whites rather than focusing on black self-betterment.
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